What do I need to know before I start a marketing campaign? What are the things I should look for? These are common questions every business has while working on their B2B marketing strategy. We want to help you learn marketing campaign best practices and understand a general layout of how your marketing campaign should look. 

Let’s start with the basics. What exactly is a marketing campaign? A marketing campaign is an organized, strategic effort to promote a specific company goal or service. It can be used to raise awareness of a new product or to generate customer feedback. The campaigns aim to reach customers in various ways that typically involve a mixture of media. Some examples of media you can use for a marketing campaign include social media, email, digital advertising, print advertising, and television or radio advertising. 

 

Defining Your Campaign and Goals

Creating an entire marketing campaign might sound complex, but it’s an easy, straightforward process – if you do it correctly. The planning process is just as important as the creative part. Planning is crucial to the effectiveness of your campaign. The planning stage determines how you will measure the success and guide your team and campaign when things don’t go as planned.

How do you plan? By defining your marketing strategy and goals. Use this stage to examine your business’ sales goals, analyze the market makeup, and further establish your strategy, goals, and budget for your marketing campaign. Sit down with your team and ask, “Why are we running this campaign? What do we want this campaign to accomplish for our business?”. It’s okay to start broad. Here are some common broad examples of marketing campaign goals:

  • To promote a new product or service
  • Increase brand awareness for your business
  • Gather customer feedback 
  • Generate revenue
  • Boost engagement
  • Advertise an upcoming business event

If you’ve chosen a broad campaign goal, now it’s time to turn it into a SMART goal. In order for a goal to be classified as “SMART”, it must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. The purpose of SMART goals is to help keep your team accountable and provide a concrete goal to aim for. Let’s look at examples of how you can turn your broad marketing campaign goal into a SMART goal.

Broad goal: “The goal of our marketing campaign is to promote our new product or service.”

SMART goal: “The goal of our marketing campaign is to generate sales from 15 established clients using an email marketing campaign featuring our new product line by December 31, 2020”.

This goal is Specific (generate sales), Measurable (15 established clients), Attainable (an email marketing campaign), Relevant (featuring our new product line), and Timely (by December 31, 2020). It’s just that simple!

 

Creating Content for Your Campaign

The next step in the marketing campaign best practices is to create content. Begin by defining your content creation plan. How do you want your campaign to look? What content do you want to include in the campaign? A great way to develop content is by identifying your ideal client persona and what their buying cycle stage looks like. 

Similar to your own business, your marketing campaign requires a mission, a vision, and a visual identity. Your campaign should be an extension of your business, both visually and creatively. It needs to be consistent with your branding, yet maintain its own identity in recognizing what the campaign is for.

How do you create content for your campaign? Consult with your marketing and social media team! They are the most familiar with your overall marketing strategy and could create on-brand copy, designs, and graphics for your campaign. 

 

Target Lists

Moving forward, the next step of your campaign is to purchase, generate, analyze, and segment lists of customers to create targets based off of profitability and return on investment (ROI). This helps to answer the question, “Who are we targeting during this campaign?”. Your alignment with your target customer can make or break the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. When analyzing and segmenting your target customers, you need to decide if you are trying to bring in new customers, or attempting to gather feedback from existing clients. Based on this decision, you need to adjust your marketing message appropriately. Those who are familiar with your business already will recognize your branding. If you are introducing your business to a new customer base, your branding should clearly define what your business is and the industry that you are in.

Using a target customer persona when creating lists will be beneficial when it comes to deciding what stage of the buying process that your audience is in – Awareness, Consideration, or the Decision stage. However, a marketing campaign can have an impact on people in various stages in their journey. For example, your campaign might target established clients, but it might also bring brand awareness to new prospects. Being trained and knowledgeable about your target audience will bring you confidence when it comes to executing your campaign. 

 

Build Campaign Assets

This stage of putting together a marketing campaign is similar to the stage of creating content. So, what are campaign assets? Campaign assets are materials such as emails, call scripts, direct mail, display ads, pay per click, and social media content that you will use during the duration of the marketing campaign. Best practices for building campaign assets include:

  • Aligning with your businesses’ goals, voice, and style
  • Aligning with your campaign goals 
  • Engage your target audience with strong, creative headlines, subject lines, and copy, recognizable visuals, and friendly, yet professional call scripts
  • Refreshing poor-performing content every few weeks during the campaign

Following these best practices for building your campaign assets can help your team stay in alignment during the course of your marketing campaign. 

 

Execute Campaign

You’ve applied best practices for all of the previous tasks and are on the road to building a solid, effective marketing campaign – now it’s time to execute the campaign! Using the campaign assets that you’ve built, it’s time for launch through email, web, direct mail, social media, or any other assets you have chosen. It’s important for your team to closely manage the execution activities to not only avoid any mistakes but also quickly stop them if they occur. 

 

Monitoring Your Campaign Results

So you’ve launched your campaign – what’s next? It’s not over yet! If you want to have a successful marketing campaign, it is crucial that you continue to monitor the campaign results even after execution. This includes customer responses, analytics, and any goals that the business has accomplished during the process of launching the campaign. Here is where you can see what your team has done right and what you can improve on for the future.

 

Follow Up on Leads

One of the last, yet important steps of creating a marketing campaign that follows best practices is to qualify and prioritize leads that come from your campaign outreach. To qualify and prioritize the leads, you should be looking at prospect profiles, demographics, and behaviors. Do these prospects understand your business goals? Would they be a good fit as a client? Work with your team to share results that have stemmed from your marketing campaign to generate qualified leads.

We hope you now know more about starting a marketing campaign and what the best practices are for your B2B marketing strategy. Looking to create a marketing strategy, but not sure where to start? We are here to help! Contact us today to learn more about how we can assist your B2B marketing needs.